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I think the map in Hollow Knight is really good and exploring it was a huge part of the appeal. Most of the time there are clues to secret areas, and a lot of them are subtle enough to make noticing them and subsequently finding the area rewarding. The path of pain really is the exception, and it screams "look me up on a wiki". It's also where the game mistakenly veers into being a twitch precision platformer, which the health and death system is really not well set up for. It's the biggest flaw in what I otherwise consider an all-time great. I don't think that specific example has much to do with modern tastes, it's just obtuse in a way the game otherwise mostly isn't!

I absolutely adore Hollow Knight but this is for sure it's greatest failing. There is a secret area hidden behind a breakable wall that otherwise looks like an ordinary wall that you have to jump to hit - no one is finding that organically.

I don't recall U3 being difficult, certainly no more-so than the previous games.
I liked the melee too, it was more involved than the previous games and things like counters and contextual actions made it a lot more satisfying, One of my main criticisms of U4 would probably be it's melee being a step back from U3, if I remember it right.

Uncharted 2 is a real step up from the first game - that's when the series goes from good to great. Uncharted 3 steps up the individual set-pieces and iterates on the gameplay, but lacks coherence with its obviously designed-by-set-piece story, which leads to it being an overall worse experience even if better in miniature. Uncharted 4 evolves the series into something much more calmly paced (for Uncharted) and character driven and is excellent for it, and a particular highlight is its foray into wide-linear pseudo open world design for one particular chapter.
Basically, don't judge the series by the first game - it has its positives that make it worth playing, but it's the worst of the lot.

My first finished playthrough I sided with the NCR, and subsequently I've played to completion as an independent. Two things I really like about the ending - 1) being able to negotiate your way out of the "final boss" with high enough speech/barter, and 2) finding out the fates of all the minor factions, making it a lot more granular than just "here are the three endings".
Not sure what you must have done to lock yourself out of siding with the NCR though.
For Wild Wasteland, there aren't that many encounters and some of them are quite subtle if you don't know what to look out for - finding the corpse of Indiana Jones in a fridge as a reference to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is only going to get more obscure as a reference!

Looked it up, it's from the weapon shop? I barely spoke to him tbh, I mostly just found good equipment and didn't change it up much (there didn't actually seem to be that many tiers of weapons in the game).